Well, yesterday was Digital Learning Day. By all accounts, it was a busy day across the country. Lots of conversation and high-profile events and demonstrations of students doing cool stuff with technology…

Should every school day be Digital Learning Day? Nope. We still need down time from these electronic and virtual spaces of ours, times when we experience the joy of human connection, nature, solitude, reflection (and all of those other things that people say I should be experiencing!). But, nonetheless, we definitely need ‘more digital, more often’ in most of our primarily-analog schools, so it was good to have a nationwide day that reminds us of the power of digital learning.

Here are a few things that caught my eye from the unrelenting stream of educational technology news yesterday:

Apparently some students got to testify before the Ohio House of Representatives about digital learning. I love to see tweets like this one or this one. In contrast, I’m not so enthused about tweets like this one (from a district in Alabama).

But you weren’t on Twitter yesterday, so it’s likely that you saw none of this. And, yes, you probably also would have seen someone posting a picture of some strawberries or talking about how they just went to their kid’s Little League game. Or some friendly banter between friends. Or even someone chatting about walking their dog or the great sandwich that they just ate. Good grief, who posts that stuff? Don’t they have anything better to do with their lives?

Instead of being on Twitter yesterday, perhaps you were talking with your neighbors over the back fence. That’s a real relationship, isn’t it? Not like those so-called online ‘friendships’ where people ‘like’ each other. That back fence relationship is great, isn’t it? Almost every day you share little tidbits with each other. Much of it is banal or just friendly chatter, but much of it also is useful: where’s the best place to get this, how can I find that, do you have any suggestions for how best to accomplish this other thing, by the way I saw this thing today that might interest you, and so on. At some point you also realized that those small day-to-day interactions over the back fence about each others’ strawberries and Little League games and dog walks and sandwiches have somehow added up to something more enduring: lasting friendships and a positive interdependency that you never would have anticipated at the beginning.

Because you’re not on Twitter, what you don’t realize is that Twitter is the back fence you share with your neighbors. Except your neighbors are people all over the world who share your interests and passions and can help you accomplish your personal and professional goals. Every day you have a chance to learn from these online neighbors. Every day you have a chance to receive resources that you otherwise never would have found. Every day you have a chance to intersect with people who care about what you care about and are willing to help you be more productive and save time. And much of it is banal or just friendly chatter, but much of it also is useful.

What’s that? You don’t want to be part of a community that shares your interests? You don’t have time to learn? You’d rather not receive helpful resources? Oh, okay. Good for you, I guess.

I’ve been using a nifty little add-in for Gmail that I thought was worth sharing. Boomerang for Gmail gives you greater control of your e-mails by allowing you to hide them for specified periods of time and/or send them at later dates.

Delaying when you see a message

Clicking on the Boomerang button allows you to make a message in your inbox disappear for a while. You can set when it returns to your inbox, exactly when you think that you’ll be ready to act upon it:

Delaying when you send a message

Boomerang also allows you to delay when you send a message. You can write your message now but set it to go out later at a time of your choosing:

Automatic reminders to follow up

Boomerang also can remind you to follow up on a sent message:

This functionality of delayed seeing and/or sending is extremely useful and helps me get closer to my goal of ‘inbox zero.’ If you’re using Gmail, I encourage you to try out Boomerang.

NudgeMail

For those of you who aren’t using Gmail (and, really, why wouldn’t you be?!), check out NudgeMail. NudgeMail also allows you to have messages disappear for a while and then return to your inbox. Here are some sample NudgeMail commands:

I don’t often blog about specific technology tools, but Adobe’s new Project ROME looks intriguing. Check out the two videos below. It seems like there might be some powerful possibilities for educators and students.

Dangerously Irrelevant - where I put my longer, hopefully more thoughtful writing and have extended conversations with readers

Twitter - where I share resources and converse with others in shorter snippets

Delicious - where I bookmark sites that I want to use or revisit later (although I don’t use this as much as I should)

Mind Dump - where I put things that I want to capture (e.g., quotes, videos, images) for posterity; my personal archive for stuff that is too short or off-topic for Dangerously Irrelevant but also is too long for Twitter or Delicious (i.e., I want more than just the URL and a few keywords)

Google Reader - where I share out items from my incoming RSS feeds that I think will be of interest to others

I’m now using TwitterFeed to feed everything from Dangerously Irrelevant, Mind Dump, Delicious, and Google Reader to Twitter and Facebook. Everything that goes through Twitter also is sent automatically to LinkedIn and Google Buzz. So if you’re following me on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and/or Google Buzz, you should see everything that I’m sharing out. And, of course, many of you have put Dangerously Irrelevant and/or Mind Dump in your RSS readers (thank you!).

I could use Evernote for sharing publicly but instead I use it to archive things that need to be more private than Mind Dump (such as meeting notes, my highlights from Kindle books, and the HTML coding for my web sites). I also use other social media sites such as Flickr, YouTube, and Vimeo but I share their content through my five main channels above.

The feeds for Dangerously Irrelevant, Mind Dump, Delicious, and Google Reader all have been run through Feedburner so I can monitor RSS subscribers. I set up TwitterFeed to run everything through bit.ly so I can track how often items get retweeted. I also am using Google Analytics.

For those of you who are interested, here are the URLs and RSS/email feeds for my five main channels:

I think I’ve got all this set up so that there’s no duplication in any one place. For a while there, for example, I was posting the same resource more than once in Facebook. If you notice any future duplication, please let me know.

Many commenters commented on the undesirability (or futility) of “requiring people to learn.” I understand and probably am in agreement with that idea. And yet we try to do this all the time, in education and other professions. The idea that we should require professionals to stay up-to-date in their field is by no means radical. Teachers, administrators, lawyers, doctors, nurses, etc. – we all are required by law to go back to school, participate in workshops, attend conferences, and so on (interestingly, professors aren’t). If we can require people to learn via face-to-face (or perhaps online course) settings, is requiring educators to use RSS readers any different?

Another thread in the comment stream was that we shouldn’t force educators to do anything. Rather, we should demonstrate the utility of tools like RSS readers and then hope that educators will be drawn into using them. This, of course, is the professional development strategy that we use for most desired changes in P-12 education. How’s that working for us? Do most school organizations achieve whole-scale educator adoption through the use of training that is designed to induce, rather than initiatives that “force,” educators into action?While I’m a big fan of individual choice, I also confess that I’m skeptical of the efficacy of the inducement approach. I think we get a few educators that way - usually the ones that are change-oriented in the first place - and the rest go about their business as usual. For example, Suzie Martin said in her comment that she hopes to get 5 staff members out of 40 to use RSS readers. I don’t think it’s naive to believe that we can do better than that with our professional development.

In a similar vein, we all can think of examples where desirable wide-scale educational and/or social outcomes only were possible through forced action. You know, things like mandatory school attendance, seat belt usage, vaccinations, and desegregation. Is “forcing” people to do things always bad?

Douglas Reeves says that “action drives belief,” not the other way around. He contends that it’s usually difficult to see the benefits of something before we do it because it’s too abstract. We have to start doing it - and thus turn the conceptual into something more concrete - before we actually see the benefits and buy in. This is why, for example, many school districts require educators to be in professional learning communities (PLCs). At the beginning, most educators aren’t clear what the benefits of PLCs will be to them. Over time, however, if the initiative is done well (and, unfortunately, in education that’s a big if), the idea is that educators will start seeing - through their ongoing PLC activities - the benefits of belonging to such a group. Does action drive belief or does belief drive action?

Stephen Downes has been hammering at us edubloggers for years to get out of the echo chamber and expose ourselves to a diversity of voices. Similarly, Tim Kastelle notes in his commentary on Ethan Zuckerman’s TED talk that “Connecting ideas to each other is the core creative act in innovation. And it is well-documented that we make more creative connections between ideas when we are exposed to a greater diversity of ideas.” Do we believe that exposing educators to a diverse set of high-quality peer voices is beneficial? If so, how do we go about making that happen? In the past we’ve relied on conferences, workshops, book clubs, and the like. Can’t we take advantage of digital technologies’ efficiencies to help us accomplish this goal?

Daura said in her comment that “Not everyone is on the technology train, and I don’t think anyone should be forced to jump on board.” Kalyn replied in her comment, why not? I agree with Kalyn, not Daura. I realize that I’m mostly preaching to the choir here, but technology really isn’t an “edufad,” is it?

Gerald Aungst said in his comment that “if admin says we must do it, it’s probably not good for us.” Really? Have dialogue and trust levels between administrators and teachers degraded so much that a blanket statement of that sort is true? I know that’s a fair statement for some districts but I hope that’s not true at a large scale because, if so, we’ve got much bigger problems than whether educators are effectively integrating technology into their work.

These are some of the main thoughts that I’m mulling right now on this topic. I’m still sold on the idea that exposure to a (perhaps pre-curated) diverse set of high-quality voices of professional peers who are doing interesting things with instruction and/or technology would be beneficial for all educators. For me, the questions are not around the benefits but instead around the scalability of such a change.

As always, I welcome your feedback. Thanks, everyone, for the great conversation!

Last summer many of you helped create our wonderful lists of grade-level and subject-specific blogs that other educators could load into their RSS readers. I’m bouncing around a few thoughts in my head about those lists:

Should we require school employees to have loaded RSS readers (with a concurrent expectation that they spend time checking them and reading in them)?

How would the lives of the educators in your school organization be different if they regularly spent time with their loaded RSS readers?

How would the lives of preservice educators (i.e., student teachers) be different if they regularly spent time with their loaded RSS readers?

Can we figure out how to give educators professional development / licensure renewal credit for time spent with RSS readers, interacting with other educators in social media channels, etc.? We seem to be able to do so for face-to-face training, discussion groups, school book clubs, and so on…

Thoughts on any of this? Got your own questions you’d like to add to my list?